Opinion Column

Rush was right

There should have been something for everyone in President Barack Obama’s second inaugural address. For liberals, a full-throated call to arms. For conservatives, vindication.

Obama settled once and for all the debate over his place on the political spectrum and his political designs. He’s an unabashed liberal determined to shift our politics and our country irrevocably to the left. In other words, Obama’s foes — if you put aside the birthers and sundry other lunatics — always had him pegged correctly.

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Obama’s full inaugural address

If you listened to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, you got a better appreciation of Obama’s core than by reading the president’s friends and sophisticated interpreters, for whom he was either a moderate or a puzzle yet to be fully worked out.

Rush, et al., doubted that Obama could have emerged from the left-wing milieu of Hyde Park, become in short order the most liberal U.S. senator, run to Hillary Clinton’s left in the 2008 primaries and yet have been a misunderstood centrist all along. They heeded his record and his boast in 2008 about “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” and discounted the unifying tone of his rhetoric as transparent salesmanship.

They got him right, even as he duped the Obamacons, played the press and fooled his sympathizers. David Brooks, the brilliant and winsome New York Times columnist, has been promising the arrival of the true, pragmatic Obama for years now. In his column praising the second inaugural address, he appeared finally to give up. “Now he is liberated,” Brooks wrote. “Now he has picked a team and put his liberalism on full display.”

Paul Krugman, also of The New York Times, wrote blog posts over the past few years titled “Obama the Moderate” and “Obama the Moderate Conservative.” For Krugman, Obama could never have proved himself a liberal short of an order to liquidate the kulaks. Even he, though, wrote of the second inaugural: “Obama has never been this clear before about what he stands for.”

After years of portraying Obama as cautiously picking through warmed-over Republican ideas, an Eisenhower Republican miscast by his opponents as a liberal ideologue, Obama’s allies exulted in his open embrace of liberal ideology.

The media, as a general matter, loved the speech. They praised Obama’s post-partisanship and now they praise his post-post-partisanship. They aren’t strictly contradicting themselves because the content is the same. In his old post-partisan phase, the president passed a nearly $1 trillion stimulus, a universal health care bill sought by the left for decades and a massive regulation of Wall Street. All prior to his “liberation.”